Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  “You ought to check into the financial arrangements for this field house they’re building,” Gregor said. “I don’t know anything about this Henry Hare, but I didn’t like what I saw of him, and I liked even less what I saw of his wife. And you know what multimillion dollar projects are like. The potential for white collar crime is enormous.”

  “I can’t investigate Henry Hare,” Rob Collins said gloomily. “Not while Jack has got that little nun on the leash. I can’t investigate anyone.”

  “Mmmm,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “I don’t like this,” Father Tibor Kasparian said. This is not a positive attitude.”

  Tibor still had his paper open to the pages with the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot story on them. Gregor contemplated his own face upside down and watched Rob Collins do the same. This was definitely not a positive attitude, but he didn’t know what to do about it. This was definitely not a positive situation. He looked up and watched the maypole in Ararat’s front window. It would have looked gay and bright if Tibor hadn’t ruined it, by letting him know that it portended a party where not just people, but Actual Armenian-American Adults, would have to submit to pushing potatoes with their noses and acting out charades.

  “Well,” Rob Collins said after a while, “what do you think we should do? Maybe we could hire somebody to break both of Jack Androcetti’s legs and take him out of the picture.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “Maybe we could arrange to have him called out of town.”

  “Do you have friends who will do that for you from the FBI?” Rob Collins asked.

  “Of course I don’t,” Gregor said. “I think movie producers ought to be shot. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has to be the stodgiest organization in the United States government. The Bureau does not go around playacting to make life easier for former agents. And when they try, they blow it.”

  “Yeah,” Rob Collins said. “I’ve dealt with the Feds before. They always blow it.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “I wouldn’t say always.”

  “Listen,” Linda Melajian said, rushing up to their table. “You’ve got to go see. There’s a big car parked right in front of your house with three men in it dressed all in black and I think they’re looking for you.”

  Since Father Tibor lived behind Holy Trinity Church and Rob Collins didn’t live on Cavanaugh Street at all, Gregor Demarkian presumed that Linda was speaking to him. With that assumption, he got up from the table and went to stand beside the maypole in the window. He looked up Cavanaugh Street and found just what he’d been told to look for. There was most certainly a big black car parked on the street in front of his house, and there were most certainly a couple of men dressed in black inside it. That they were looking for him—and not for Donna Moradanyan, Bennis Hannaford, or old George Tekemanian—was tautological.

  Gregor strode to the door of Ararat, pulled it open, and went outside.

  3

  LESS THAN TWO MINUTES later, Gregor was standing on the sidewalk between the black car and his own front stoop, knocking politely on one of the smoked glass windows nearest the street. Behind that window there was some movement to and fro, and then the whirring sound of the electric window opener bringing the glass down. The young man just on the other side of that window was wearing a clerical collar. He looked Gregor up and down and said, “Are you Mr. Demarkian? Mr. Gregor Demarkian?”

  “That’s right,” Gregor said.

  “Good,” the young man said. “We’ve been calling your number for hours. We’re from the Chancery. From the Archbishop’s office?”

  “I know what a Chancery is,” Gregor said drily.

  “Well, the Archbishop would like to see you,” the young man said. “Right away. He says it’s very urgent.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  In fact, Gregor Demarkian was more than sure it was. He would have staked the fate of his immortal soul on it.

  With Roman Catholic Archbishops, everything was always urgent.

  Chapter 5

  1

  THE THREE YOUNG MEN in clerical collars did not take Gregor Demarkian to the Chancery, or to the Archbishop’s informal residence out on the Main line, but to St. Elizabeth’s College. Since Gregor had been expecting it, he was neither panicked nor annoyed, only a little curious. Would the Archbishop himself actually be at this meeting? Gregor had only met one Roman Catholic archbishop, John Cardinal O’Bannion, up in Colchester, New York. John was an ex-sailor, an ex-boxer, and an ex-the Lord only knew what else, but considering the difficulty he had remembering not to swear it was probably something interesting. What Gregor had heard about the Archbishop of Philadelphia was very different. What he had seen of him—on television and in the newspapers—was very different, too. Tall, elegant, the product of one of the country’s richest and most socially prominent Irish Catholic families, he had been educated at Groton and Harvard before deciding to enter the seminary. Having decided to enter the seminary, he had been immediately recognized as a young man with extraordinary potential and channeled into the heavier academic tracks. After ordination he had spent a year at a university in Rome, another two years working in the Curia, and another year and a half after that writing a book on canon law. His first Explanation of the Catholic Faith, a catechism for adults, had been published when he was thirty-two. A twenty-fifth edition, with an appendix detailing the intricacies of Vatican II, had been published the year before last. He was a Prince of the Church of the old school, a throwback to the days of the Counterreformation, the kind of Archbishop laypeople automatically thought of whenever a pope died. His name was David Law Kenneally, and from what Gregor had heard he liked being called “Your Eminence” very much. Gregor couldn’t imagine Kenneally in the same room with John Cardinal O’Bannion. It was a stretch imagining those two in the same church.

  The car went through the gates of St. Elizabeth’s as Gregor remembered them, but turned off almost immediately in an unfamiliar direction. Gregor looked out the windows and saw lawns covered with nuns. There were nuns everywhere and then more nuns again, as if, just out of his line of sight, they had begun cloning themselves. Gregor wondered if this is what it had been like, back in the days when the Sisters of Divine Grace had had enough vocations to staff a college like St. Elizabeth’s entirely with nuns. He supposed even that had been less disconcerting, because even a staff full of nuns couldn’t create the effect he was now seeing. The black car pulled up in front of a tall building with a discreet carved wooden plaque planted in the ground cover on the lawn in front

  CONVENT.

  Gregor peered up at the double-doored front entrance to see Sister Scholastica pacing back and forth, her arms folded across her chest under the long black collar of her habit, her veil held to her bright red hair by what seemed to be a single bobby pin. Or maybe nuns didn’t use bobby pins to hold their veils on their heads. Gregor didn’t know. He did know what he meant.

  The three young men had not said much on the trip in to St. Elizabeth’s, but they had been unfailingly polite, and they were unfailingly polite now. As soon as the car came to a full stop, the one in the front passenger seat hopped to the curb, grabbed the handle of Gregor’s door and opened it. Then he held out an arm to help Gregor to his feet and didn’t look offended when Gregor didn’t use it. Up at the convent’s front door, Sister Scholastica hesitated, looked hard to make sure she was seeing what she was seeing, and then came down the steps toward them. The young man at the curb asked Gregor if there was anything he could do, shook his head a little when Gregor said there wasn’t, and backed away when Sister Scholastica came striding toward them.

  “Gregor,” Sister Scholastica said. “You don’t know how happy I am to see you. You don’t know how happy all of us will be to see you. Especially Sister Agnes Bernadette. She’s been hysterical. And Reverend Mother General. Come with me.”

  “Sister?” the young man at the curb said.

  “It’s all right,” Sister Scholastica tol
d him. “The Archbishop is with my Reverend Mother. You weren’t asked to bring Mr. Demarkian right to His Eminence himself?”

  “Well, no,” the young man said. “We were just supposed to get him here.”

  “He’s here,” Sister Scholastica said.

  She put her arm through Gregor’s and began tugging him toward the convent’s front door.

  “You won’t believe what’s been going on here,” she told him. “You’d think the police would have been crazy enough for anybody, but we had to get together and make it worse. What do you think about that?”

  Gregor didn’t think anything about that. He was still a little surprised to be here on such short notice—and a little embarrassed, because it was a public indication of just how much he wanted to be involved in this case, and Gregor made a point of never admitting that he wanted to be involved in a case at all. He let Sister Scholastica lead him up the steps and through the convent door, saying as little as possible.

  Scholastica was talking like a woman just released from a sixteen-year vow of silence. Her strong voice with its Upstate New York accent filled the tall-ceilinged foyer; she bounced up the stairs to the second floor.

  “The nuns have been bad enough,” she told him, “but we’ve got more than nuns here this weekend, and the other people have been just plain impossible. I don’t care what you say about appreciating other people’s cultures, give me Americans every time.”

  2

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER been in a convent before Vatican II. He had no idea if convents had been structured differently then, or if a conservative order like the Sisters of Divine Grace still did things basically as they had always done. He was fairly sure that he would never have been allowed in the convent’s private rooms—which he had been in Maryville, when he had gone to the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace to look into the death of a postulant named Brigit Ann Reilly—but that was something else again. Scholastica led him up one hall and down another, stopping every once in a while to make the sign of the cross with holy water and say a quick prayer near a statue or a picture. She came to a halt in front of a tall, antique wooden door with a crucifix covering it that started two inches above the floor and ended two inches below the ceiling. Gregor found the effect—an emaciated, suffering Christ as tall as Gregor was himself, a set of nail wounds that could have come out of a medical school textbook—distinctly disconcerting. Scholastica stepped in front of the door, opened it, and went inside.

  “Your Eminence?” she said. “Reverend Mother? I have Mr. Demarkian.”

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Reverend Mother General said. She slipped past Sister Scholastica and came out to meet Gregor, pushing the door back wide as she did so. Gregor noticed that she managed to make her habit look more conservative than it actually was. She took his arm and began tugging at him much as Sister Scholastica had done. Nobody in this Order seemed to think they had time for anything but hurrying this morning.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Reverend Mother General said again as she ushered him into what turned out to be a massive office, complete with a football-field-size desk, carved oak built-in bookcases, and a crucifix at least as large and well detailed as the one on the door. There was a tall man standing behind the desk, wearing a pair of clean blue jeans and a cotton sweater. He managed to make clean blue jeans and cotton sweaters look as if they ought to cost a hundred dollars apiece at Brooks Brothers. Reverend Mother General stopped in front of the desk and motioned to the man behind it. “Mr. Demarkian, this is David Kenneally, the new Archbishop of Philadelphia—new these last four months, I believe—and of course the de facto religious superior of the nuns in this house—”

  “What Reverend Mother is trying to say,” David Cardinal Kenneally said drily, “is that I have no influence in this place at all. How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve heard a great deal about you from John O’Bannion.”

  “I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard from John O’Bannion,” Gregor said. “Right at about this point in the proceedings, I usually get a phone call that starts, “I know you’re probably busy but—’ ”

  “We tried,” Sister Scholastica said. “The Cardinal called you four times this morning. You were out.”

  “I was eating my breakfast,” Gregor said. “In peace.”

  David Kenneally cleared his throat “Yes. Well. I assume you must know why we’ve asked you here. It seems we’ve gotten ourselves in a great deal of trouble.”

  “I taught David in the eighth grade,” Reverend Mother General said. “He used the royal We then, too. David, you haven’t gotten yourself into a great deal of trouble. The Order has gotten itself into a great deal of trouble, and in the process put the Archdiocese in a very difficult position—”

  “She used to talk like this back when she was teaching the eighth grade,” David Kenneally said. “Seriously, Mr. Demarkian, Reverend Mother has explained to me your reluctance to involve yourself in this matter under the circumstances and I can hardly say I blame you—”

  “But I’m not reluctant to involve myself in this matter,” Gregor said. “I’m not reluctant at all. I spent all of last night making notes about what I saw happen, what I think happened, and how it might be all worked out. My problem is that I don’t know how I could possibly be of any help to you or to the Sister who was arrested, given the fact that—”

  “That the police are being entirely too uncooperative,” David Kenneally interrupted. “Yes, I see. But you can consult, can’t you? That’s what you do. You consult. And we seem to need some consultation.”

  “At least you could talk to Agnes Bernadette,” Reverend Mother General put in. “She really is distraught. She has every right to be distraught. Unless you think she actually was the one who—”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think that. Let me ask you something. If I was to—consult, as you put it—do you think you could get some people to talk to me? Some very specific people?”

  “I could probably deliver any practicing Catholic in this Archdiocese,” David Kenneally said, “appealing to courtesy if nothing else.”

  “I could deliver the Pope,” Reverend Mother General said.

  The Pope won’t be necessary,” Gregor said faintly. “What I’d like to do first is to talk to Sister Agnes Bernadette, not here but over at St. Teresa’s House. I want to go down to the kitchen where the food was prepared—I did understand that rightly, the food was prepared at St. Teresa’s House?”

  “That’s right,” Sister Scholastica said. “The cold food, anyway. There were some hot dishes that were made other places and then brought over to be microwaved up.”

  “But the chicken liver pâté was made there,” Gregor insisted, “and the fugu fish was stored there—”

  “That is quite correct, Mr. Demarkian,” Reverend Mother General said. “And as for the fugu fish, possibly you should talk to the chef—”

  “He only speaks Japanese,” Scholastica reminded her.

  “Perhaps you should speak to Mother Andrew Loretta,” Reverend Mother General corrected. “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll get Sister Agnes Bernadette, Mother Andrew Loretta, and that chef over there at the same time. That way, you can question them all. Is there going to be anybody else you’re going to want?”

  “I’m going to want quite a lot of people,” Gregor said, “but the only one you might have difficulty getting hold of is Nancy Hare.”

  “Nancy Hare?” Scholastica looked shocked.

  “I’ll get on the phone to Henry,” David Kenneally said with a sigh. “Oh you don’t know how I don’t like to get on the phone with Henry. I’ll try to have Mrs. Hare here in an hour.”

  “Tell her she’s been granted an ecclesiastical annulment,” Scholastica said acidly. “She’ll be here in twenty seconds flat.”

  Reverend Mother General ignored her. “Come,” she said to Gregor Demarkian. “Help me over to St. Teresa’s House. I like to watch you operate.”

  The last time, Reverend Mother General had se
veral times threatened to make sure he couldn’t operate at all, but Gregor didn’t think this was the time to mention it. With nuns, there were a lot of things there would never be time to mention at all.

  3

  LIKE CAVANAUGH STREET, St. Teresa’s House seemed to have decided not to let go of Mother’s Day. Gregor didn’t know if he was noticing more of the decorations today because the place was relatively deserted, or if little elves had come in the night and tied baby blue ribbons to every available surface, but the general effect was one of almost maniacal mother worship. Of course, Catholics didn’t “worship” Mary any more than Armenians did, but Gregor would have been hard put to make that point to anyone whose first experience of Catholicism was the long hall leading to the basement kitchen of this particular place.

  MAY IS MARY’S MONTH,

  one poster after another proclaimed. The relentless message was relieved only by variations, like the blue-and-white concoction that declared

  THE MOTHER OF GOD IS THE MOTHER OF US ALL,

  Sister Scholastics saw Gregor staring at the posters and whispered in his ear, “They were made by the elementary-school children in all the parish schools run by this Order in Philadelphia and on the Main line. The deal was there was going to be a contest, and the winners were going to get their posters put up here during the convention, except nobody wanted to disappoint any of the children and besides the teaching Sisters were all worried about self-esteem—”

  “In my day we didn’t have self-esteem,” Reverend Mother General said from Gregory other side. “We had self-respect. And no more of it than what we had earned.”

  Sister Scholastica went on ahead, opened a door covered with a picture of Mary holding a child wearing a gold crown, and said, “Oh, Aggie, there you are. And Mother Andrew Loretta. Do you know—”

  “Mr. Yakimoto will be here in just a minute,” Mother Andrew Loretta sang out